Archive for the ‘ethics’ Category

Peter Singer challenges the way we live in the relatively prosperous western world (“western” here is less a geographic designation than a state of mind and material comfort) on many fronts, including how we eat, how much we luxuriate, how much we earmark for our own offspring, and how much we give away to strangers. He sets the bar of selfless generosity much higher than our culture of consumption rewards. But the rewards of consumption don’t begin to match those of humane compassion.

“If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.”

“If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit non-humans?”

“The Hebrew word for “charity” tzedakah, simply means “justice” and as this suggests, for Jews, giving to the poor is no optional extra but an essential part of living a just life.”

“Just as we have progressed beyond the blatantly racist ethic of the era of slavery and colonialism, so we must now progress beyond the speciesist ethic of the era of factory farming, of the use of animals as mere research tools, of whaling, seal hunting, kangaroo slaughter, and the destruction of wilderness. We must take the final step in expanding the circle of ethics.”

“To give preference to the life of a being simply because that being is a member of our species would put us in the same position as racists who give preference to those who are members of their race.”

“Philosophy ought to question the basic assumptions of the age. Thinking through, critically and carefully, what most of us take for granted is, I believe, the chief task of philosophy, and the task that makes philosophy a worthwhile activity.”

Talking about runaway trains in CoPhi has reminded me again of that amazing subway hero who thought nothing of risking himself to save a stranger. My students had not heard of him. The Stoics were right, fame and notoriety are but fleeting wisps. “See how soon everything is forgotten,” meditated Marcus Aurelius. “The only lasting fame is oblivion.” Our largest deeds are destined to be forgotten, sooner than we think. Sic transit gloria indeed.

So, as a tribute to forgotten heroes and an inspiration to us all, especially those who told me yesterday they’d not be willing to pull the lever to divert the train and avoid killing five innocent (though oblivious) track loiterers– that would be “playing God” (though the job does seem available)– here again is what happened on January 2, 2007:

Wesley Autrey was waiting for the downtown local at 137th Street and Broadway in Manhattan around 12:45 p.m. He was taking his two daughters, Syshe, 4, and Shuqui, 6, home before work.

Nearby, a man collapsed, his body convulsing. Mr. Autrey and two women rushed to help, he said. The man, Cameron Hollopeter, 20, managed to get up, but then stumbled to the platform edge and fell to the tracks, between the two rails.

The headlights of the No. 1 train appeared. “I had to make a split decision,” Mr. Autrey said.

So he made one, and leapt.

Mr. Autrey lay on Mr. Hollopeter, his heart pounding, pressing him down in a space roughly a foot deep. The train’s brakes screeched, but it could not stop in time.

Five cars rolled overhead before the train stopped, the cars passing inches from his head, smudging his blue knit cap with grease. Mr. Autrey heard onlookers’ screams. “We’re O.K. down here,” he yelled, “but I’ve got two daughters up there. Let them know their father’s O.K.” He heard cries of wonder, and applause…

“I don’t feel like I did something spectacular; I just saw someone who needed help,” Mr. Autrey said. “I did what I felt was right.”

It was spectacular, of course. Unlike Philippa Foot’s hypothetical thought experiment, this moment from real life involved a serious risk of death to the Decider. His choice was not to “let nature take its course” (as someone said in class yesterday) but to be a positive force of nature himself.

Wesley has indeed been an inspiration, with a growing cadre of imitators. There have been subsequent subway heroes, including one Delroy Simmonds. “Everybody is making me out to be some sort of superhero,” Simmonds said. “I’m just a normal person. Anybody in that situation should have done what I did.”

Western countries throw out nearly half of their food, not because it’s inedible — but because it doesn’t look appealing. Tristram Stuart delves into the shocking data of wasted food, calling for a more responsible use of global resources. “We, the people, do have the power to stop [the] tragic waste of resources if we regard it as socially unacceptable to waste food.”

Same goes for fossil fuel waste, climate change, you name it. It begins down here in the grass, with the people.

“What to watch next” – We read Michael Pollan‘s Botany of Desire in an earlier version of our course, and he’s a terrific TEDster. Mark Bittman, Pam Warhurst… And if you thought food and climate were unrelated issues, consider:

@GOOD: Eight foods you should stock up on before climate change takes them away http://ow.ly/e0V32 ”-Bourbon, coffee, chocolate…No!

I’ve just spent an hour reconstructing a bibliography of some of the texts I’ve used in the Environmental Ethics course in the past, appending it to the texts we’re about to use this semester, sticking it in a sidebar on our open-access course site. It’s a pretty good list. Seems like I’d be an expert by now.

An errand pulled me away from grading and into the vicinity of the huge new McKay’s used book & music emporium yesterday. Of course I had to go in. “Free will”? Ha!

And look what I found for a nickel.

This will be the place to begin Environmental Ethics in the Fall, with our focus on what ever happened to the activist passion of the first Earth Day. Yale law prof Reich’s bestseller was the hippy-trippy manifesto that launched a thousand protest demonstrations on behalf of Mother Earth over forty years ago, and raised the consciousness of a fraction of a generation for at least a short while. Reich, looking back recently, explained its improbable impact this way:

It gave people a great leap of hope, made people feel good. This was a world that could get better, a whole lot better. I might say to those who stuck with it in some way or other they will still swear by the values of the ’60s.

And what’s changed?

What is lacking today is that people are not in any way experimenting with a different way to live, a different way to feel, a different way to be.

I think he’s right. We need to experiment with alternative energy, alternative transportation, alternative jobs, and especially an alternative sensibility about how it might be possible to live sustainably for a long time on a crowded but healthily bio-diverse planet.

Will we ever get back to the giddy greenery of the ’60s? Not sure we want to. But books like Blessed Unrest and Rebuild the Dream point an experimental way forward, possibly even a “movement.” We’ll be reading and discussing (and acting on?) them both in our course. And other things too. Stay tuned.

November? How’d it get to be November already? October really flies when you’re in the World Series.

But it’s time to turn the page and think ahead. Not too far ahead, Spring Training doesn’t start for another three and a half months. Since weaning myself from football, on ethical grounds, I’m down to one spectator sport. (I like basketball well enough, I just don’t like being indoors.) In theory that should mean more time and attention for reality.

Reality. What a concept.

Yesterday I turned my attention to next semester and the reprised Atheism & Philosophy course we begin in January. Two years ago it was Atheism & Spirituality. This time the focus is on ethics, and an attempt to think through William James’s claim in “Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” that we can be good (or bad, or indifferent) without any external support.

Whether a God exist, or whether no God exist… we form at any rate an ethical republic here below. And the first reflection which this leads to is that ethics have as genuine and real a foothold in a universe where the highest consciousness is human, as in a universe where there is a God as well. “The religion of humanity” affords a basis for ethics as well as theism does.

That rings so true to me that I’ve never really challenged it. Dostoevsky was just wrong, I’ve insisted: if a God doesn’t exist there are still plenty of things not “permitted.” Sartre was wrong too: you don’t have to embody a God-given essence in order to exist as an ethically-bound individual, and community standards are not arbitrary for being sui generis. We are social animals, we possess a capacity for compassion and mutual concern, our goodness (and badness and indifference) are natural. This I believe.

But it’s not enough merely to believe, if you call yourself a philosopher. So we’ll see. Should be a good course.

Now, though, back to present reality. We’re taking a breather in SOL, if you can call an exam that, but will get back shortly to JMH and her “Bodies” chapters. “You are not in your body. You are your body.” That’s why my morning coffee can pack such an existential punch, and that about wraps it up for Cartesian dualism. Right?

Horowitz is right: Plato or Aristotle? Kant or Mill? There’s no formula or simple answer, and crowdsourcing is not the way to resolve philosophical and ethical problems (Joshua Knobe’s version of X-phi notwithstanding.) “Ethics is hard.” But fun.

Up@dawn 2.0

Up@dawn was launched in April 2009. Its mirror & successor as of June 2013 is Up@dawn 2.0: http://jposopher.blogspot.com/

The new site is a successor in several senses. It will bear whatever initial revisions it may occur to me to make in my dawn posts. The old site will thus stand as an uncorrected, unvarnished record of dawn's earliest light, as I've reflected it, and of my earliest daily errors. "Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things," as James said in "Will to Believe."

So, the two sites may also stand together as a record of their fallible author's occasional correction and growth. "If I get up every day with the optimism that I have the capacity for growth, that's success for me." (Paula Scher)

Both sites will remain dedicated to the Thoreauvian proposition that morning "is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night.”

And as for versions 3.0 and beyond? My intent is that they will one day pop up between hard covers.

“To be happy in this world, especially when youth is past, it is necessary to feel oneself not merely an isolated individual whose day will soon be over, but part of the stream of life flowing on from the first germ to the remote and unknown future.” Russell says this in the "Family" chapter of Conquest of Happiness, and while he's talking abo […]

Horace Who?The one who said, before Mr. Keating, to seize the day. Carpe.... carpe... carpe diem. I haven't seen Dead Poets Society in awhile, but I don't recall that he said the rest of it. Dum loquimur, fugerit invida Aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero. "As we speak cruel time is fleeing. Seize the day, believing as little as po […]

"A Free Man's Worship" was originally "The Free Man's Worship" (1903), a more than merely stylistic change.Russell's trajectory generally was away from precise Platonic exclusion and towards a pluralistic loosening of attitude and judgment. He would later declare his "outlook on the cosmos and human life... substantial […]

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Who’s up

I'm an early-rising philosophy prof at a large state university in Tennessee, with interests in American philosophy (especially William James and John Dewey), in humanism/naturalism/atheism, in science and exploration, in walking & cycling & baseball, in literature, in pop culture, in the pursuit of happiness, and in the perpetual dawn of day.

I'll be preaching in secular church this coming Sunday at 10 am, at Nashville's Sunday Assembly. They meet now at the lovely Scarritt-Bennett Center. Their website's events page falsely credentials me in psychology, as a "super ace" - ? - but I'll be happy to join them under any label. This month, don't worry, be happy. Or, […]

I am jealous, George.Those familiar with George Orwell’s “1984” will recall that “Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought.” I recently felt the weight of this Orwellian ethos when many of my students sent emails to inform me, and perhaps warn me, that my name appears on the Professor Watchlist, a new website created by a cons […]

...You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the GalaxyWorld and Science (@WorldAndScience)The size of Hubble's Deep Field image in relation to the re […]

Morning air!

...let me have a draught of undiluted morning air. Morning air! If men will not drink of this at the fountainhead of the day, why, then, we must even bottle up some and sell it in the shops, for the benefit of those who have lost their subscription ticket to morning time in this world. -Thoreau

Why write?

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. -HDT

Morning

Why do we bother with the rest of the day,
the swale of the afternoon,
the sudden dip into evening,
then night with his notorious perfumes,
his many-pointed stars?
This is the best—
throwing off the light covers,
feet on the cold floor,
and buzzing around the house on espresso—
maybe a splash of water on the face,
a palmful of vitamins—
but mostly buzzing around the house on espresso,
dictionary and atlas open on the rug,
the typewriter waiting for the key of the head,
a cello on the radio,
and, if necessary, the windows—
trees fifty, a hundred years old
out there,
heavy clouds on the way
and the lawn steaming like a horse
in the early morning.
-Billy Collins

Strong coffee, whanging sun, skimming gulls

How at the mercy of bodily happenings our spirit is. A cup of strong coffee at the proper moment will entirely overturn for the time a man's view of life. Our moods and resolutions are more determined by the condition of our circulation than by our logical grounds. *** Remember when old December's darkness is everywhere about you, that the world is really in every minutest point as full of life as in the most joyous morning you ever lived through; that the sun is whanging down, and the waves dancing, and the gulls skimming down at the mouth of the Amazon, for instance, as freshly as in the first morning of creation; and the hour is just as fit as any hour that ever was for a new gospel of cheer to be preached. I am sure that one can, by merely thinking of these matters of fact, limit the power of one's evil moods over one's way of looking at the cosmos. -William James

Last Days of Socrates
Usefully annotated and hyperlinked edition of Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo.

Pale Blue Dot: a vision of the human future in space
Carl Sagan’s spiritual vision of our future. He likes William James’s definition of religion, ” a feeling of being at home in the universe.” But “if we mean the real universe, then we have no true religion yet.”

Too big to fail

I've learned that available tools apparently do not at present allow the migration of a blog this size to the Blogger platform, where I also have a virtual presence with Delight Springs (delightsprings.blogspot.com) and others.
But should this site ever fall inactive for an extended, unacknowledged length of time, its author very likely has succumbed to holiday fever, diagnosed illness, death, or technological incapacity beyond his limited computational proficiencies. In the latter (relatively-happier) event, look for Up@dawn's reincarnation at: http://jposopher.blogspot.com.
Phil
Up@dawn